Lee and LiPuma's masterful essay Cultures of Circulation caught my attention the first time I read it as

a sophomore in university. I've since reread it many times. I have to admit, the bulk of their analysis of
derivatives is lost on me. I know next to nothing about currency hedging or financial markets. But the
introduction, wherein they describe performativity and new forms of cultural analysis, has become
something of a manifesto of mine. Not only is it hip, new and different from a lot of the cultural theory
I've had to read, but it very neatly outlines several points which I've found incredibly enlightening and
important during my studies.
However, on my latest rereading of this essay, I noticed something strange. Lee and LiPuma introduce
these conceptsor rather, they introduce their piece with these new conceptions of readingand then
launch into their analysis and argument about the changes in markets and national economies. That's
well and good, and I don't believe the piece suffers for it. In fact, it makes sense. They explain their
tools. What struck me was the way the piece could be reversed if one desired to reverse it. Rather than
explaining the instruments they will use to analyze changes in the modern economy, they could have
begun by laying out these changes, and explaining the necessity of their new hermeneutic tools.
While, again, I don't have much knowledge about markets or derivatives, that's what I'd like to do here.
I'd like to briefly talk about the changes in economics Lee and LiPuma analyze, and begin to elaborate
on the ways they require the shift from analysis that focus on interpretation and the transmission of
meaning, to performative analysis. By way of conclusion, I'd then like to begin examining why these
same analytic tools are useful for the study of literature, in particular translation. Translation, after all,
is a sort of transnational production that is both part of literature as we normally consider it, and also
exceeds national literature. In many ways, I believe translation to be the perfect example (maybe 2nd to
circulating capital) of why a new sort of reading is necessary.
As I stated earlier, the bulk of Lee and LiPuma's analysis focuses on derivatives, or new financial forms
used to hedge risk. This marks a shift from traditional Marxist analysis by creating a system wherein
value itself becomes self-reflexive. It used to be the case that value was created by workers who offered
up their labor in exchange for money. Thus, Marx creates a model of collective agency in which
objectification and fetishism embed a third-person perspective on exchange relations within a firstperson dialectical model of social totality (9). By offering up one's labor, the first-person subject can
be incorporated into the third-person, objective system. Lee and LiPuma analyze the very unmooring of
that system through the development of systems like derivatives. Finance capital takes what was once
value and multiplies it by separating it from labor. Value thus floats in its own world, growing and
shrinking without any explicit relation to labor. As they state, Marx's analysis affords no place for
these new financial instruments.
What kind of analysis can help us understand these new financial instruments? Answering that question
requires a critique of contemporary analysis as well. Performativity, as Lee and LiPuma put it
objectifies the object's own praxis. That is, The performative dimension to each imaginary is located
in a new form of collective agency through the coordination of specific actions (6). There is, however,
a difference between the collective agency of the market and other imaginaries. Unlike in the case of
the nation, there is no we, the market. Though ostensibly created through acts of buying and selling,
the market itself is somehow conceived of as separated or removed. Thus we performatively construct
the market, while simultaneously alienating ourselves from it.
Traditional Marixst analysis, as well as performative accounts, fail to properly account for this distance
between the agents that compose the market and the third-person collective agent itself. Lee and
LiPuma see this distance partially as a result of complex financial instruments like derivatives, the

functioning of which are completely mysterious to normal people. However, it also illustrates a failure
of much contemporary analysis. To quote the final sentence of Cultures of Circulation:
Any contemporary account, to succeed, will have to theorize and thematize the historical transition we
are undergoing: from production-centric capitalisms linked to modern social imaginaries privileging
the nation-state, which seek to encompass rival capitalisms through the extension of production-based
capitalismto the emergent circulation-based capitalism and its concomitant, a transformed set of
social imaginaries that privileges a global totality as it produces new forms of risk that may destroy it.
(22)
We must analyze derivatives and contemporary financial instruments because they are the latticework
upon which we have build our contemporary culture and literature. As Lee and LiPuma write on
imagined communities if the first imaginings of the nation required the global circulation of printed
material, the spread of print capitalism relied no less on a host of financial institutions (18). Returning
to translation, it shouldn't be shocking that readers silently consent to reading foreign novels, ignoring
the original text, in the same societies where there currencies are silently tied to foreign stocks and
products. Yet, at the same time, these processes do make international literature increasingly possible
and necessary.
If we apply these lessons to the world of literature (or world literature), particularly literature in
translation, I believe we can learn a thing or two about how we read translations. There is a
deterritorializing force at work in every act of translation. The text is set to become something else. It is
ripped form its original context, and forced into a new form. However, that for is immediately
reteritorrialized onto a new national form. As such, each translation represents both a specific cultural
(and therefor, national) moment, while also simultaneously being international. It lives within, and
illustrates certain borders, even when everything culturally specific about it is removed.
This dual nature is most obvious when we consider it from an academic perspective. When a student
encounters a work in translation, it often looks like any other book. Usually there is only the author's
name on the cover, and we have to hunt to find the name of the translator. Yet, we still conceive of the
text as somehow foreign. It is a piece of another culture. It will not be assigned in normal literature
classes, but rather specific, national literature classes. We will be asked to read it, but not to perform
close reading, because it is translated. Rather, we are given assignments wherein we hunt through these
texts looking for signifiers of difference, moments of cultural specificity, or maybe even the awkward
moments that somehow confirm it is a work in translation.
The average person's relation to translations might be more ambivalent. Maybe they bought the book
without even realizing it was a translation, and didn't notice until they opened and found all the
characters' names to be bizarre. Maybe they wanted to encounter some exotic place or culture, so they
bought a book set in a far off country. Maybe the untranslated words left in italics with slight
explanations added to aid comprehension are exciting, fresh and new. Or maybe they're obnoxious and
obtrusive. It's hard to say. Either way, the reader gets a little bit closer to something far away, foreign
and different. But in a specific way. In a way that locates that difference, and makes it knowable as
difference.
Much like in the imagining of the modern market, reading in translation seems to create an imaginary,
from which we are instantly alienated. For any performative reading of translated literature to be
effective, it must account for both the national character, as well as the international character of the
translated text. That is, the reading of a translation simultaneously strengthens national boundaries

while crossing them. As such we must move from a conception of boundaries as the thick, black lines
on a map, to one that considers permeability. What is allowed to pass through in translation? What can
cross the border form one language, into another? What is held back? And, possibly most importantly,
what new substances are created through the creation of a border? These are the questions we must ask.